Provisional Walls
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: Somehow Osamu finds he's stumbled out of death and back into life - or what he thinks of as death and life anyway, since coming back to life is supposed to be impossible in itself...


**A/N:** Written for the Mega Prompts Challenge, writing prompts #152 – epiphany device. It's quite philosophical, which I know isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it was fun to write. :D

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**Provisional Walls**

Sometimes, you just have to accept you're running away and then stop running, otherwise you'll run on forever or off a cliff without even noticing there's no ground left beneath your feet. Sometimes, you have to face the fact that you've made some horrible mistakes and then just get on with your life – because, even if you're already dead like me, at some point you'll realise there are just too many ways to turn back and only one dark road ahead.

I'm not saying everyone can just wake up from the dead. I'm not even sure why _I_ could – and it had nothing to do with being a "genius", I'll tell you that. But, for whatever reason, that possibility _was_ there, and at some point eternity seems like it'll never end and the only thing you can do to change is to get off the path you're on.

And when you've been running on that single track for a long time, that means one of three things: trip and fall – which isn't likely if you're running about after death, since the pitfalls one could possibly trip over tend to be pre-mortem. Then you can just stop running: an easy option, that, so long as you remember _how_ to stop – because everything is limitless in the afterlife…if you can really call it the afterlife.

The third option is to turn around and run the other way. It's not a sure bet that'll do any good. It all depends on your definition of "turning around", I guess. Physically turning around…doesn't do much good where the forth wall doesn't really exist. Mentally turning around…well, that's another story.

_The_ story actually. And even though it all starts well before death, that's really the best place to explain it from. Death, I mean. I'm not sure you'd call this true death, because most people believe death to be one of the things in the world that are absolute. The amount of absolute things varies quite dramatically between people, but death tends to be somewhere on the list. For some people, it's the _only_ thing on the list. For others, there's a fair few others. Things like life and love tend to find themselves on the list quite often. So does family. Other things like the existence of world peace are quite rare to see.

Not that I've ever seen anyone make a list of all the absolute things in the world. It's more just a passing comment. One of those things that strays from the topic at hand and then leads back to it. Just like the path from death, my death, led back to life the moment I stopped running on it – running in circles perhaps, because that's the easiest way to visualise falling off a path only when you turned away from the set course.

As for what makes a person turn away from the path they've been following for eternity when even time becomes meaningless and the world around them is never-changing? That's a difficult question to answer, really. Maybe it's something to do with those few strings of our souls still connected to life. Or the people we left behind. Or maybe a combination of the two – because, out of the blue…or black I suppose, I saw my little brother's face, like I'd seen it the day I died.

It was a horrible thing: the last thing I ever saw in life, but it had faded away over time. Things tended to do that, when all you saw was darkness and that darkness went on beyond infinity – unless you brought that whole theory where infinity is a loop and the graph one draws of tangent functions is not on a flat piece of paper but on a metaphorical sphere that connects the asymptotes that are said to "tend to" infinity. But once you're not on that infinite loop you can wind up on a road that actually has an end somewhere – and that's what happened. I suddenly remembered my brother, for whatever reason, and then I was looking right at him.

At his image in a television screen, more exactly. Standing in a desert with the sun beating down on my back and burning my eyes…since I had been in the darkness for quite a while. A few years at least, if time ran the same as it did in the human world – if, indeed, my brother _had_ lived out his life in the human world.

At that point, there hadn't been anything to suggest he hadn't…except for the worm-like thing that sat on his shoulder. Actually, there wasn't a whole lot to suggest he even _was_ my brother, except instinct – and considering it was instinct that had stopped my aimless jog through infinity, who was I to question it?

And considering how overwhelmed I became upon seeing my brother's face on that screen, who was I to even question how such a thing was possible in the first place? How I could see my brother, after having died for so long – or thinking I was dead. And how was he in the television, talking to a worm of all things.

Actually, a worm's not that strange. Ken had been the sweetest person I'd ever known, and I'd met a lot of people in my life. It came with the plastic label of being a genius: everyone wanted to see your face, shake your hand, and then forget about the things that existed beneath that skin. But not Ken: he wanted to see the deeper parts of everything, that sweet kind part he was so sure everybody had. Maybe that was even one of his absolute truths. And of course he'd be able to find something in the sort of creature most people would just crush under heel and walk away from. That was just the type of person he was.

But the fact that he's grown so tall, and his face has gotten so much thinner – almost gaunt, and his eyes have a sort of shadowed look about them as well. No, not shadowed: the sort of look turpentine had: dark and murky but moist, still moist. Like he was trying to hold back his tears.

I touch the screen, feeling its sudden coldness a jarring comparison to the heat that surrounded me – and yet, I can't care about either of them. My universe centres around Ken. Maybe, it had always centred around Ken. But the heat and the cold and the sudden sadness that wraps around my neck and throttles me – all of those things come with being alive, my little picture book image of life that and happiness and sadness and at least one of the five senses at work. But life had once been one of those absolute truths for me…before I felt sand and sun and television screen and realised I'd somehow wandered out of that realm.

Unless this is the world of death: the true world, and that was just an in-between. And I entertain that notion for a while, coming up with theories and counter theories and outlandish ideas that I instantly discredit because that is what I do and I wait, just like I was waiting in that eternal directionless darkness, searching without really searching for something I didn't know I was looking for.

Except this time my brother is there behind the screen and this time things are a little more tangible, and if I have come back to life – because the death I'd imagined was more akin to my previous state than this, and even if it weren't I see absolutely no resemblance to the images of gardens and rivers or fires that bare the world and the skin… I just see a desert – and not endless either, for dots appear on the horizon, moving about, making noises that come slowly closer as the dots become bigger and more shaped…

Maybe I am standing framed in the sun like a man that had just walked out of death. Because they stare at me in awe as much as I stare at them in bemusement – until someone breaks _that_ fourth wall and I can start moving, or running, again. Running back to that television screen because I've just been told it's _oh so real_ and there's no reason for me to believe otherwise – except I crash into it, unable to get through – and now there's no running or trying to figure out what direction to go in, but just waiting around for that gate to open up and take me back to my brother. Because there's no question now: somehow I've gotten here, alive and confirmed by little creatures that call themselves digimon like the worm that sits on my brother's shoulder, and that's the next step.

And, in between now and then, there's a lot more to think about. Things that had been arrested while wandering aimlessly though death, false or true.


End file.
